Does your home liquor cabinent look a little depleted? This is a friendly reminder that starting tomorrow the price of a bottle of liquor is going to go up by about a dollar. If you’re buying a bottle of Remy Martin Louis XIII Cognac (cost per liter = $1,974.60), you probably won’t even notice the difference, but an extra cost might be significant to those chugging Crown Czar Vodka (cost per liter = $11.60).

So, plan accordingly and make a stop at your friendly neighborhood Liquor Store [liq.wa.gov] and stock up before it’s too late!

Advice for those looking to make the most of the monthly changes in liquor prices —

Sometime in the last week, a brave new tenant of the possibly cursed Broadway storefront (#406, above Harrison) opened their doors to the general public. This season’s fresh-faced contestant is Pho Cyclo Cafe, expanding beyond their BelltownSouth Seattle location to bring another Vietnamese option to Capitol Hill.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine on the subject of becoming a true resident of the city, Colson Whitehead claimed “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” [#] While the same might be said for any city, I’m afraid that it might be cheating to use memories of previous residents of 406 Broadway as a basis for the formation of a permanent Seattle identity. Instead, one might gain credibility by the number of occupants that one can remember occupying the space.

In any case, best of luck to the new guys. Opening a steaming soup restaurant in the summer can’t be the easiest challenge, especially with Pho institution Than Brothers just over a block away (and with vegetarian options).

There is the saying about death and taxes being among the few certainties in life. As long as I’ve lived in Seattle, I could count on the Stranger being truly, madly, deeply in love with building a monorail. Through all of the votes and re-votes, they were like a true north on the issue. 1

“Build the Monorail” they said over and over again. While they still like the idea, the finances have finally caused a rift in their dedication for the project.2 This afternoon, on the Stranger Blog, Erica Barnett announced that the paper is going to call for a re-vote on the project. [#] It seems that the honeymoon is over long before the wedding march started.

I’m glad that they pre-announced the story. Finding out about this all at once by picking up the paper might have been too shocking to handle. This way we have a few hours to prepare ourself to this reconfiguration in local worldview.

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(1) This might not actually be true. A google search for “monorail site:thestranger.com” returns over 4,000 results and I’m still sort of on vacationaand in no mood (or position) to do extensive fact-checking for a quick weblog entry about another weblog’s post.

(a) which is why the weekly weekly reader is still on hiatus
(2) To be fair, the “What Seattle Needs” article did end with the phrase “That’s worth $1.7 billion right there.” [stranger] Since the latest cost estimates are about 10 times higher, this sort of thing might qualify as something of a prenuptial agreement.

Don’t you just love it when someone takes a bunch of useful internet tools and turns them into something even cooler and more useful than each of the parts? In yet another thrilling use of the Google Maps API, Chris Smoak has created an amazing visualization project for the Seattle bus system. Add busmonster.com to your bookmarks and be astounded by it’s niftiness.

In addition to the already mentioned Google Maps, the project incorporates some of the most useful parts of the King County Metro site, which is a nice resource for keeping up-to-date about the latest in transit developments, schedules, route maps, and the very cool point-to-point trip planner [#]. BusMonster also uses some of the cool work from the University of Washington’s Intelligent Transportation Systems research group [#], which built tools to allow you to know when a bus is about to show up at your stop (mybus) or to watch the busses from your computer screen (busview).

In any case, if you’re someone that uses the bus to get around town or just like looking at really well-designed information tools you’re bound to find BusMonster to be a fantastic resource.

Did you know that there are over 750 registered owners and riders of European scooters around the Puget Sound? Much more, did you know that there’s an existing Vespa Club of Seattle thriving here in our lovely city? Well, that was news to me!

For the past 20 years, Seattle has had a huge cohesive motorscooter community, and to formalize this kinship, the Vespa Club of Seattle was formed to organize the various types of European scooter riders in Seattle into a group that doesn

It is a bring your own bean bags to sit in kinda event, and there are some movies where it looks like they are going to do a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and/or Rocky Horror thing with real actors from Jet City Improv mocking or commenting on the on-screen activity.

Tonight’s inagural film for the 2005 season is Napoleon Dynamite, which results in the most “Oh my god, you have not seen that! You have to see that!” responses from people when I tell them I have not actually seen it out of any movie I have not seen in a long time. Then I get some line about a mexican appetizer but pronounced incorrectly. I dont get that part, but the film certainly has its fans.

Beats sitting in a giganto-plex watching Batman’s Teenage Years Part 3 .

Today is the last day of Gnomedex 5.0, a 3-day “online media” convention. Even though I know things don’t work that way, I can’t help hoping that the added influx of techy geeks to our fair city will help iron out some of my recent tech issues. Kind of like how the entire city gets the flu at the same time.

I have a laptop, and occasionally I like to pretend I’m a tourist, and go out looking for free wifi. I’m no expert, so my method of finding and connecting to wifi consists of opening up the laptop and kind of waving it around in the air, hoping to catch wifi cooties.

On a recent trip into the U-district, I figured I might as well try out the new government-sanctioned free wifi. What could possibly go wrong? I knew from a previous trial at Columbia City that it worked, and I also knew that I was going to be at the crossroads of it: yea verily, almost the corner of 45th and University.

So there I was sitting in Twice Told Tales playing with a kitty, and thought, I’ll whip out my laptop and see what I can get. And I can *see* the free wifi — I just can’t seem to connect to it. Of course, I can also see the chai wifi from across the street, and some unidentified wifi (which I eventually relented and connected to instead).

So, Seattle, what gives? You have to make this thing more idiot-proof!

If you’ve never seen The Buttersprites perform, you owe it to yourself to head to the Rendezvous in Belltown this Friday for their CD release party. The Buttersprites perform poppy, punky, high-spirited music dressed in an array of dazzling and fun costumes. It’s impossible not to smile at a Buttersprites show.